We thought we would use this blog post to report more progress on our EntitySpaces 2009 Q3 release. However, before we continue we want to point out that our current production release is EntitySpaces Q1 2009.1.0209.0 and it is available now, it is also very stable (as usual). Okay, so here is some of the new functionality, we are working through our Q3 Wish List forum posts.

In the above image we have selected the EntitySpaces 2009 Metadata tab. We have highlighted two areas in the image for purposes of this post. The red box is a .NET PropertyGrid control and we use this now instead of what we used to use, which was a .NET DataGrid. Not only does it look better and allow us to group data by functionality, but it also allows for easy editing. The blue box highlights certain fields that you can edit directly in the metadata. Notice that you can edit the “Alias” directly in the Metadata. Also, there is an Exclude flag which you can set to true to indicate that you want this column skipped entirely during code generation purposes. There is also a new flag called IsUniversalConcurrency which you can set on any integer type field (I can see econner jumping for joy already!). This will allow you to have exact matching schema’s across multiple databases and still have concurrency checking. The reason this is needed is Microsoft SQL’s Timestamp for instance is not really compatible with other database systems, or said better there really is no universal concurrency checking built into dbms systems so we will provide one for you. Finally, we have IsCustomAutoKey and CustomAutoKeyText, these will replace the current way that Oracle users (and possibly others) have to provide key/value pairs in our user metadata. We will automatically convert your current UserData.xml files for you to support his new approach. All of our Metadata is now presented this way (not just column information).

What is nice about this new approach is that we can expand it easily in the future and behind the scenes any values that you edit end up in the user metadata just as it would if you were typing in key/value pairs only it’s so much easier. We are also considering making IsInPrimaryKey editable so that you can make tables without primary keys appear as though they had them.

Also, we have eliminated the problem that prevented you from daisy chaining queries when joins were involved.

We have also flushed out the DynamicQuery API such that you have no operator precedence issues, for instance.

query.Where(42 > query.Age);

or

query.Where(query.Age < 42);

The same holds true with our mathematical operators as well.

query.Select(“Wow” + query.FirstName + “Cool”); // notice the string “Wow” comes first

or

query.Select(100 * query.Age);  // Notice the 100 comes first

Progress is moving very rapidly and we are still passing at 100% in our unit tests (including a bunch of new tests that have been added).

From Mobile Devices to large scale enterprise solutions in need of serious transaction support, EntitySpaces can meet your needs. Whether you’re writing an ASP.NET application with Medium Trust requirements, a Silverlight application, a Mono application, or a Windows.Forms application, the EntitySpaces architecture is there for you. EntitySpaces is provider independent, which means that you can run the same binary code against any of the supported databases. EntitySpaces is available in both C# and VB.NET. EntitySpaces uses no reflection, no XML files, and sports a tiny foot print of less than 200k. Pound for pound, EntitySpaces is one tough, dependable .NET architecture.

EntitySpaces LLC
Persistence Layer and Business Objects for Microsoft .NET
http://www.entityspaces.net